By Scott Gilfoid: There will be two Fury’s on Saturday’s fight card at the ESPRIT Arena in Dusseldorf, Germany. Besides Tyson Fury, who will be battling IBF/IBO/WBA/WBA heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, heavyweight prospect Hughie Fury (17-0, 9 KOs) will be putting his unbeaten record on the line against 38-year-old Adnan Redzovic (16-1, 5 KOs) in a scheduled 10 round fight.
Hughie, 21, had previously been talked about fighting 36-year-old journeyman Nicolai Firtha, but that fight won’t be happening for some reason.
It could be that Firtha has too much pop in his punches for the likes of Hughie, and might be a little too risky for a fighter as inexperienced as Hughie clearly is.
Surprisingly, the Hughie Fury vs. Redzovic fight is pretty much the entire undercard for the Klitschko-Fury card. The only other fight on the card is a super featherweight contest with Jono Carroll facing a still to be determined opponent.
It looks to me like Klitschko really scrimped on the undercard by having basically a skeleton crew as the support for the fight. It’s hard to imagine a novice like Hughie being the chief support for the Klitschko-Fury card. For the boxing fans that have traveled all the way to Dusseldorf in order to see the Klitschko-Fury card, you’re not going to get much other than the main event unless you’re a huge Hughie Fury or Jono Carroll fan.
Hughie, 6’6”, is more or less a project. He’s someone that needs a tremendous amount of work in his game in order for him to potentially someday wind up as a contender. Right now, Hughie doesn’t appear to have developed his man strength at 21, and he’s clearly not ready to face any of the top contenders in the division for that reason.
WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder recently threw Hughie a bone by offering him a fight for his WBC world title last September, but Hughie and his trainer reportedly declined the offer because they wanted more time to train for the fight.
You can understand from Wilder’s part why he would be willing to offer a guy like Hughie a title shot. It would have setup a much bigger fight for Wilder against Tyson Fury. First Wilder destroys young Hughie in one or two rounds, and then Tyson Fury would come around and try and avenge the loss to Hughie. It was something that might have worked out.
Hughie is coming off of a 2nd round knockout win over little known fighter Emilio Ezequiel Zarate earlier this month on November 14th in Bristol. I don’t know where they found Zarate at, but he looked dreadful. Hughie was able to score a fast knockout over him, but they picked someone that was so beatable that he would have been vulnerable against the lightest of punchers in the heavyweight division.
Despite the knockout victory, there are still major questions about Hughie’s lack of punching power. Those questions are likely to still be there after this Saturday when Hughie faces another obscure heavyweight with questionable talent in 38-year-old Redzovic. If the idea is to make Hughie look better than he actually is by putting him in with fodder opposition that topples over after the first punch, I don’t think it’s going to fool the boxing public. They’re not going to be impressed by Hughie knocking out some little known old guy.
Redzovic was knocked out in the 9th round last year in 2014 by Arnold Gjergjaj. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of Gjergjaj, but then again I’d never heard of Redzovic until this week.
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